Language and Identity Politics: The Linguistic Autobiographies of Latinos in the United States

One of the lasting effects of post-structuralism is our self-conscious use of language. Foucault's deconstruction of power-laden discourses, Derrida's insistence that language composes our consciousness itself, and Lacan's assertion that psychological development is predicated upon entrance into the "symbolic order" of language plant identity, language, and power firmly on even ground. The concrete results of this poststructuralist legacy are all around us in phenomena such as "politically correct" speech, bilingual education, and college level courses in Spanglish—as well as in the backlash against each of these linguistic movements.

Language is identity and identity is political. This is the premise of the autobiographical writings Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodríguez, Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey by Ariel Dorfman, and "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" by Gloria Anzaldúa. In these autobiographies, the description of language heritage is aligned with family and ethnic history. In each case, language development occurs in both Spanish and English from an early age. As adults, language choice becomes a political act for these writers, a means of positioning themselves in relation to power. Rodríguez, for whom monolingualism in English becomes a strategy for success in U.S. society, brings his personal experience to the political realm by promoting English as the sole language of public education in the United States. Dorfman, who also views English and Spanish as diametrically opposed, writes his autobiography in an effort to accept his "English side" by overcoming his association of English with North American imperialism. Anzaldúa, on the other hand, reflects on her linguistic background with a fine toothed comb, untangling the many strands of English and Spanish that coexist in her multilayered identity. Nevertheless, while their politics may be widely divergent, all three writers view language as the very essence of their selves. They cannot conceive of telling their life stories without putting the spotlight on their linguistic affiliations.

In recent studies on autobiography, the nature of the relationship between the self and language has become a point of contention among scholars. The traditional view of the autobiography holds that it is a genre in which the details of an independent self that transcends language are accurately recorded. According to convention, its claim to veracity and authenticity is precisely what distinguished the autobiography from other literary genres (Eakin, Fictions 185). Phillipe Lejeune has postulated that an "autobiographical pact," an implicit promise that the author, narrator, and protagonist be one in the same, is established between the writer of the autobiography and the reader (14). As the autobiography has risen to prominence in Western culture, together with the individualism that was the legacy of the Enlightenment, readers became trained to recognize and expect that the writer of an autobiography fulfill this "contract" (Eakin, Fictions 203).

However, another branch of study on the autobiographical genre has questioned the "autobiographical pact" and has instigated a reversal in the perception of the self. Rather than assume that a life story is a non-fictional account of an autonomous being, some scholars investigate the manner in which the self is invented by the language that is used to narrate its life story. Paul DeMan's analysis of the genre has been particularly effective in revealing the fictitious nature of autobiography. For DeMan, the self is constituted by language and therefore cannot transcend it. His observation that "[. . .] autobiographical discourse tends to posit the self as the cause of language rather than its most profound effect" (Eakin, Fictions 191) underlines the impossibility of the genre to explain a "life" as if it were an entity under scientific study. DeMan's assertion that language precedes identity is also key to psychological approaches to the self that recognize that language is what grants humans "the self-reflexive dimension of their consciousness" and their ability to interact with others, thereby developing their own subjectivity (Eakin, Fictions 195).

DeMan's critique has spurred interest in the role of language in creating a self via the autobiography. Paul John Eakin has carried this preoccupation with language one step further by...